News from the Library of Congress

July 29, 1994

This year, with the addition of contributions from the
British Library, the Library of Congress Name Authority File has
expanded to become the Anglo-American Authority File (AAAF).
Negotiations with the National Library of Canada are also under
way to enable it to contribute electronically to this name
authority file, and the Library has begun discussions in a
similar vein with the Australian Bibliographic Network.

The AAAF, an authoritative source of information for
catalogers, provides standardized forms of more than 1 million
names, representing authors of more than 100 million works held
by the Library of Congress and the British Library. Authors may
write under pseudonyms, nicknames, or under names in non-
romanized languages that may be transliterated in a variety of
ways. To provide consistency of access, a single form of name is
chosen in a library catalog as the authoritative form, and other
forms are listed as cross references.

Sarah Thomas, director for cataloging at the Library of
Congress, said: "Major cooperative efforts, such as those with
the British Library and the National Library of Canada, will make
high-quality cataloging data available to a wider audience at a
time when LC's data base is being accessed by users around the
world via the Internet."

The AAAF is available on-line to thousands of libraries that
can eliminate formerly redundant work spent to control the form
of names used in individual library catalogs.

Before the shared authority file, different libraries often
chose different authoritative forms for a name and thus could not
easily share each other's cataloging information. A single,
shared authority file facilitates cooperation through the ability
of libraries to use cataloging information from other libraries
with the confidence that the forms of names will match those in
their own catalogs. For library users this means the
availability of cross references from variant forms of names to
the controlled forms and faster availability of bibliographic
information through cooperative programs. Researchers will be
able to use the same form of name when accessing multiple library
catalogs through computer networks, saving time and effort.